About
Welcome to my site! I am Associate Professor at the University of Florida, founder and co-director of UF's International Ethnography Lab, and co-leader of the Venezuela Conflict and Peacebuilding Research Network. My most recent book, Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power and Venezuela's Security Landscape During Chavismo, is now available to order!
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Law
- Political economy
- Computer Science
- Economics
- Geography
- Criminology
- Public relations
- Psychology
Selected publications
Criminal Governance in the Post-Chávez Revolution in Times of Questioned Legitimacy 1
2025-03-19
book-chapterThis chapter, based on ethnographic work and interviews with local actors in two neighborhoods in the city of Caracas, documents and compares the configuration of two armed territorial orders in the context of Nicolás Maduro's government's attempts at authoritarian consolidation. The chapter draws on concepts of collaborative and criminal governance to understand how social control functions locally in an authoritarian context where a political, economic, and humanitarian crisis has restricted the resources and scope of government. The Venezuelan case reveals the processes of mutation in the relations between armed actors and a fragmented state seeking social control in the territories of armed actors in a context of contested government legitimacy.
2025-03-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 9 focuses on the legacy of Chavista security policies and how they will shape Venezuela’s future. Drastic political change leaves a mark and lives on by building a new foundation for what comes after. As noted by scholars, the Bolivarian Revolution will leave behind a legacy of intensely centralized power in the executive office and political mobilization and empowerment within sectors that the state has historically marginalized. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the revolution’s most important legacy will be the ways in which policing and coercion have been reorganized under Chavismo. It argues that this legacy includes frayed state-police relations, the militarization of security, the expansion of lateral violence, and the pluralization of nonstate violent actors. The chapter reviews the book’s implications for scholarship on the left turn in Latin America, police studies, and authoritarian power in the 21st century.
2025-03-20 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This book provides the first in-depth analysis of policing and security policies during the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Much scholarship on this period has focused on either the breakdown of liberal democracy or the progress made by grassroots movements and historically marginalized groups during Chavismo, ignoring what will perhaps be the revolution’s most important legacy: the ways in which Chavista policies transformed coercive power and the security landscape. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, focus groups, and survey research collected over 10 years, the book analyzes how security policies within the context of the pink tide and the later turn to authoritarianism contributed to the expansion of lateral violence and the pluralization of nonstate armed actors. Far from the always already authoritarian project proposed by many scholars and pundits, this book shows that the Bolivarian Revolution was defined by highly contested and contrasting visions of security that resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent ordering of state and society. Moreover, by pairing the vantage point of street-level police officers with that of ordinary barrio residents this book provides a unique analysis of how insecurity during revolution was experienced “from below.” Chapters demonstrate that the formal and informal security policies implemented by Chavista governments to navigate diverse threats, while contradictory and inconsistent, had a net result of disrupting and rearranging police institutions, outsourcing security to and dispersing coercive power across multiple nonstate actors, and individualizing security. These policies and their outcomes are essential to understanding how and why police violence increased so dramatically in the country.
2025-03-20
other1st authorCorresponding2025-03-20
other1st authorCorresponding2025-03-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 5 explores young men’s experiences in the barrios during the Bolivarian Revolution and asks how surviving in spaces left unsecured by the state shapes the subjectivities of men who later become police officers. It is argued that like men who join gangs in violent urban environments, officers learn from a young age that in certain interactions displays of domination are essential to achieving intertwined goals: physical survival and accruing masculine capital. Previous scholarship has analyzed how neoliberalism requires that women take on responsibilities, often related to social and community services, previously shouldered by the state. This chapter analyzes how a certain type of leftist revolutionary government and the dispersal of coercion its policies produced resulted in an individualization of security that charged men with responsibility for their own survival. It shows that some men at the urban margins take up this responsibility through a practice of personal defense grounded in domination. By analyzing how the dispersal of coercion affects men’s personal lives, this chapter contributes a novel explanation for understanding officers’ perspectives on coercion and their resistance to reform. Moving beyond the traditional focus on police culture, the chapter demonstrates that to understand police officers’ perspectives on use of force and efforts to reduce it we must study them as products of popular sectors transformed by state and lateral violence in recent decades. The chapter closes reflecting on alternative practices officers deployed off the clock in search of safety.
La baisse du taux d’homicide au Venezuela expliquée – de façon erronée – par Trump et par Maduro
2025-03-04
article1st authorCorrespondingThe New Socialist Mother and Her Fight against Crime
2025-03-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter looks at the responsibilities women were expected to take on in popular sectors in Venezuela as state and nonstate violence increased. The chapter asks: If men make up the majority of victimizers in Venezuela, why were women more often targeted by programs to reduce crime and violence? Rather than constructed as a public problem for state policy to address, it is shown that crime and violence were primarily situated by state and popular discourse as rooted in the private domestic sphere, falling within the “feminine” domain. Despite the fact that state policies promoted a pluralization of armed actors, women were blamed for violent crime and for the loss of their sons to it. State actors’ domesticization of crime worked within the public sphere to resolve contradictory and incoherent policies while reproducing essentialist discourse about women and men. Though Chavismo was intended to be an anti-neoliberal project, state discourse on women’s role in fighting crime mirrored neoliberal gendered subjectification processes seen across the region that individualize and privatize public problems.
2025-03-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Chapter 3 discusses how and why the government of Hugo Chávez moved from ignoring state security forces to implementing sweeping police reform in the late 2000s. This police reform is described and some of its key tenets—including accountability, human rights, and reducing police use of force—are summarized. The chapter shows how reform threatened to disrupt entrenched interests within preexisting police forces and the military. The development of reform over time is analyzed, with a focus on how police reformers contended not only with traditional opponents—including the military and already existing security forces—but also with factions within Chavismo that distrusted the police and supported an arming of “the people.” The chapter ends reflecting on the impacts of reform and how the government of Nicolás Maduro rolled back reform after the death of Hugo Chávez.
Securing the Revolution: Part II
2025-03-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Drawing on data collected between 2018 and 2022, Chapter 8 explores the expansion of police power within the context of evolving relationships between state actors and nonstate armed groups. The chapter analyzes pacts between the government and gangs that created peace zones, or zonas de paz, and the government’s increasingly visible relationships with armed community groups known as colectivos. The chapter focuses on how police officers understood these relationships and how they affected officers’ trust in state security institutions and symbols. For officers these relationships represented state actors’ active participation in the production of crime and the erasure of lines between state and nonstate armed groups that first blurred under the Chávez government. Evolving relationships and officers’ perceptions of them also contributed to conflict among state and nonstate armed groups, further fueling beliefs that the government was complicit in officers’ deaths.
Frequent coauthors
- 68 shared
David Smilde
Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
- 64 shared
Siri Colom
Columbia University
- 64 shared
Josh Lerner
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
- 64 shared
Tom Narins
Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
- 64 shared
Bret Benjamin
Columbia University
- 64 shared
Javier Auyero
The University of Texas at Austin
- 64 shared
Aseem Mulji
University of Wisconsin–Madison
- 64 shared
Peter Evans
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